Posted on 12/10/2013 10:32:06 AM PST by nickcarraway
As healthcare.gov slowly lurches into functionality, the battle lines around the health-care law are returning to their pre-October state. Giddy conservative hopes for the law’s immediate disintegration, or its quick repeal, have ebbed, and in their place opponents have returned to hoping that the law will fail because not many people will want to buy health insurance. Ross Douthat warns, or perhaps fantasizes, that the immediate collapse may have been averted, but the long, slow collapse may yet beckon on the horizon.
The new-old mechanism for the law’s predicted demise is that only the sickest or poorest Americans will enroll — “the law can work only if people who don’t necessarily benefit immediately from its provisions decide to participate anyway,” argues Douthat. But this is a misguided understanding of how insurance works and why people want it, a point that has been demonstrated most convincingly by the eagerness of the toughest Obamacare customer base you can imagine: congressional Republicans.
The still-fresh GOP messaging about the failed website launch turns out to be highly instructive. As part of their message campaign, Republicans in Washington, and their staffers, made displays of their difficulties, or alleged difficulties, enrolling in the new exchanges. For instance, Representative Chuck Fleischmann complained about the website freezing, and being forced to pay high premiums.
Why is he going through the bother and financial cost? “I am not a fan of Obamacare,” Fleischmann told Politico. “But I was bound and determined to try to comply with the law. I’ve done everything in my power to try to do that.” That is an awfully strange way to put it. Remember, a Supreme Court ruling reduced the individual mandate to a mere tax, and Fleischmann could comply with the law by paying a small fee for going without insurance. Instead he is enrolling anyway.
And of course the great hope of the conservative movement has been to foster a massive boycott of the exchanges – burn your (imaginary) Obamacare card, pay the tax instead. The Koch brothers are paying activists to flood college-football tailgate parties, plying undergraduates with free pizza and beer so they’ll listen to their pitch to boycott the exchanges. The Weekly Standard has an unintentionally comic reported dispatch from one such effort in South Bend, Indiana, where conservative activists attempt to drum up enthusiasm among frigid, demoralized Notre Dame undergraduates (“‘If this was a sunny day, this would be packed. Everyone would have their Opt-Out stickers on,’ said Matt Zepeda, a junior.”) Even as they try to goad Americans into following the boycott, conservative activists themselves have blithely ignored it. Salon’s Brian Beutler fruitfully trolled Amanda Carpenter, a speechwriter and senior communications adviser for Ted Cruz, over Carpenter’s high-profile complaints about the slowness of the health-care site, producing this head-smacking confession:
I don’t want to be uninsured. When even as fanatical an ideological cadre as Ted Cruz’s speechwriter blurts her desperation to join Obamacare, it suggests that conservatives have deeply miscalculated.
The problem here is that their definition of who would “benefit” is exceedingly narrow. You “benefit,” by his way of thinking, only if your actuarial costs exceed your financial contributions. But that isn’t how most people think about insurance. Insurance isn’t a kind of gamble where you bet you can beat the house by consuming more in medical care than you pay in premiums and deductibles. It’s protection from risk. People like that protection. They will pay to acquire it.
None of this is to say that the exchanges will quickly and seamlessly fill with desperate customers. It will remain a glitchy, halting process filled with bureaucratic aggravation — much as private insurance has been until now. The botched website rollout gave conservatives a powerful weapon to batter the credibility of Obama and his eponymous law. But the short-term benefits of website bashing also lured them into confessing the hopelessness of their long-term plan.
Hannity recently had two PROFESSIONAL web site developers on his TV show. He asked them both how much they might have charged to construct a secure web site that functioned as necessary from the git go: Their TOP figure was around $10 million!!
That's much more than one well respected US IT firm offered to do the project for: THEY'D HAVE DONE IT FOR FREE!!
Compare those to the estimated $1 BILLION this SOB has shuttled to his cronies for this turkey and I think even the most devoted obozo worshiper can grasp the magnitude of the CORRUPTION in this on-going CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE!!! (Well that's almost certainly an overstatement...)
QUESTION: WHERE THE HELL IS CONGRESS IN ALL OF THIS?
ANSWER: On their computers checking their numbered Swiss accounts to be certain the proper amount was deposited!!!!
IF THIS DOESN'T PISS YOU OFF you aren't paying attention and you're certainly too stupid to vote.
We need an angry electoral tsunami to sweep away the parasites on the Potomac and replace them with regular, everyday, COMMON SENSE citizens who have READ and UNDERSTAND the CONSTITUTION!!
Anything short of that and we're TOAST!!
I’ve said all along, the longer this goes on, the more entrenched Obamacare will be and the lower the chances of repeal.
Starting to think Republicans have known this all along so pull the “let it collapse under its own weight” crap that they know will NEVER happen.
It was never a secret except for the chronically clueless and the terminally naive.
You might want to think ho you phrased that.
I am missing the ‘love’ part in this essay.
Please help if you can
What the hell is this lib idiot author babbling about here? Is he indicating that our anti Obama Care stance was all about the website? What a maroon.
You are right after what I have seen with these Congress PUKES I just might fall for ANYTHING!
There is no love. This is an absurdly idiotic column….and yet, some Freepers, who are looking for bad news anywhere, are falling for it.
So, how does a "hook, line and sinker" taste? You've fallen for Chait's BS all the way…….
So the solution is an impossibility, the election of a congress full of angels, perfectly virtuous citizens to save us from ourselves?
“It was never a secret except for the chronically clueless and the terminally naive.”
********
Wisely said. Almost as though you were once a denizen of Capitol Hill! :)
Pubbies love big government just like their Dem colleagues. They are two sides of the same coin.
Thanks
It is not the first time I have seen posts here where the title has little to do with the essay and is just crafted to lure readers.
Then it gets lots of comments to the title here.
My favorite was the one that had a title that said that a Mcdonalds closed (implying for good) because the employees went on strike.
But nothing about that in the piece.
So I called that same McDonalds and they said they never closed at all, probably the protesters didnt even work there.
This reads like agitprop.
Objective journalism reveals Obamacare is failing and people do not want it. Period. End of story.
This writer is trying to create irritation where there is no cause.
The fight to stop socialized medicine will not end, that is where this childish “journalist” is wrong. Instead, the fight will grow.
What’s very sad is how anxious Freepers are to jump on this. Many Freepers are sadly more interested in anti GOP news, even if it’s false, than they are the truth. I’m widely published with anti GOP e articles and books, and there’s plenty of legit news on that front - so there’s no reason to, and no profit in, this kind of self flagellation by some around here.
Objective journalism reveals Obamacare is failing and people do not want it. Period. End of story.
This writer is trying to create irritation where there is no cause.
The fight to stop socialized medicine will not end, that is where this childish “journalist” is wrong. Instead, the fight will grow.
So accurate I thought it needed to be reposted….
“I knew those GOP traitors were really for Obama-care. They just play us by talking against it. If they were against it Obama would have been removed from office by now and it repealed. They hate the Constitution and want to keep us as serfs waiting behind the illegals in line for a doctor, This article confirms it. I will never donate to the GOP again. ”
that was fun.
On the other side I notice Grahamnesty is suddenly on FNC Hannity complaining about Obamacare. Very out of character.
Republicans supported this bill from the very beginning, and will continue to support it till death us do part.
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